David H.
Stern received me in his splendid house built on a small hill in Jerusalem. We had a
drink in the large living room and then descended to a small yard where a
bougainvillaea bloomed abundantly. A few steps lower down a guest room has
been built in an old cistern cut out of the rock and formerly used for
holding drinking water. Beside that is Dr. Stern’s study. The walls are
filled with books. David had just come home from a round of jogging and
appeared very muscular for a man of 62. As well as all his intellectual
activities he also knows everything about surfing. We talk about David’s most
popular book, The Jewish New Testament.
David said, ‘The usual translations of the New Testament into English make it
hard for people to see it as the Jewish book it really is. This is why the
title Jewish New Testament shocks
people – Jews, because they think of the New Testament as a book only for
Christians, and Christians because they forget that the roots of their faith
are Jewish.’ David Stern’s books have given the Messianic Jewish movement a
strong theological foundation.

The conventional
wisdom in the Jewish community is that normal Jews do not come to faith in
Yeshua as the Messiah of Israel, and that Jews who do were either forced or
enticed, or are disturbed, deprived or depraved. My story is proof to the
contrary. Take my word for it, or find people who knew me back then: I was
intelligent, talented, successful, upright, happy and loved both before and
after he found me and I came to him. Yet even though blessed with all these
things, I lacked the answer to everyone’s ultimate question, ‘What does life mean?’ I searched for
twenty-two years; and to my own surprise, the trite but true answer is given
by Yeshua.

I am
Jewish, a fourth-generation native of Los Angeles. My
great-grandfather, Elias Laventhal, arrived there in 1853, when the
population was around 2,000; he and his wife Berthe, who sailed around the
Horn and met him there, must have been two of the town’s first twenty Jews.
Their daughter Sarah and son-in-law Jacob Stern purchased a house on the
southwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in 1904; Hollywood’s
first full-length movie was made in their barn (it’s now a museum near the
Hollywood Bowl), and the Keystone Cops were filmed in their swimming pool. He
and my father Harold Stern, were in real estate; my mother Marion Levi Stern
came from a well-to-do ‘Our Crowd’ family in New York.

So I was
born in 1935, the third son in a loving Jewish family. We belonged to the
city’s best known Reform synagogue, Wilshire BoulevardTemple,
attending its services on Rosh-HaShanah
and Yom-Kippur. We also celebrated
Passover and Chanukkah at home. My
father, by precept and example, upheld high moral standards. My mother
devoted her life to community service and at one time was president of the Los Angeles branch of
the Council of Jewish Women. She and I read the Torah aloud together when I was eight. I attended the synagogue’s
Sunday school for ten years and was considered so promising that Rabbi Max
Dubin suggested I should become a rabbi too. I praise God for my Jewish
identity and upbringing. It gave me an ethical anchor during my years of
seeking; and it gives depth, direction and context to my life in the Messiah
now.

My
spiritual odyssey began at fifteen, during a visit to a former junior high school
teacher. After hearing how my life was going, she said, ‘You’re not happy,
are you?’ In response I suddenly burst into tears. I had discovered that I
was unhappy – till then I hadn’t known it. I asked her what I should do about
it, and she recommended psychoanalysis. For seven of the next sixteen years I
spent between three and five 50-minute hours per week on the couch.

During
this time I tried to construct a meaningful life. Since I didn’t know what
life meant, this wasn’t easy! For example, my choice of college major was
arbitrary. After sampling mathematics (one semester), political science (one
year) and philosophy (two weeks), I settled on economics, because it seemed
to touch on all the subjects that interested me. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa
from UCLA at nineteen, earned an MA and PhD from Princeton University with a
dissertation on bargaining behavior, and at twenty-four became the youngest
faculty member in UCLA’s Graduate School of Management.

I had
glamorous hobbies – mountain-climbing, waterskiing, surfing. In 1963 I
co-authored the Surfing Guide to
Southern California (to be reprinted in 1998 and considered a classic by
surfers). I lived in one of the rickety old houses at Topanga Beach, directly
in front of one of the best surfing spots in the state (I should know – I
wrote the book). I became a connoisseur of fine wines. I played piano,
clarinet, guitar, recorder and organ, and composed minuets in the style of
Joseph Haydn, my favorite composer. Long before the authentic performance movement
became popular I purchased a Broadwood-and-Son pianoforte made in 1805. I
contributed to worthy causes and could feel I was helping make the world a
better place.

Family,
friends and strangers saw my life as one of excitement and purpose, but my
nagging inner question, ‘What does life mean?’ still drew a blank. After a
while it got to me. If nothing matters, why bother? On the threshold of a
promising career, I shocked colleagues and relatives by resigning my
professorship. For me, economics had not turned out to be the hub at the
center of the wheel, but the hole in the center of the bagel.

I read,
surfed and talked with friends (who seemed to know no more than I about
life’s meaning). I finished up psychotherapy and got a little happier. I fasted
27 days, after which, oddly enough, I did become inwardly at peace and
remained so. But I still had no drive to do one thing rather than another. I
could live on my investment income, so I didn’t work.

During the
hippie era I became interested in vegetarianism and became leader of a
commune that ran three health-food stores in the Los Angeles area
called ‘Back to Eden.’
I was an inept manager, so the stores went broke. A common stereotype of Jews
is that they all have outstanding business ability; would that it were true!
I looked into about two dozen religions, some Eastern, some Western, some –
who knows? It never occurred to me to investigate either Judaism or
Christianity. Not Judaism, because my experience of growing up in it had not
led me to expect that it could address the questions of life’s meaning (it’s
a common mistake that adults judge the religion of their childhood by the
criteria of children). Not Christianity, because, ‘as everybody knows, Jews
don’t believe in Jesus.’

I sought
to extract from these various religions whatever I could use in putting
together a world-view; in effect, I was out to create ‘Sternism.’ None of
these religions held me for long except one, which I followed for two years,
because it, unlike the others, had a theory of history. I couldn’t have told
you that at the time, but this was its attraction – the other religions found
neither meaning nor direction in the sequenced events of human civilization.
I mention this because the intellectually satisfying thing about the Bible is
that it tells you that history has a beginning, a middle and an end – a
direction, a purpose, a goal. Moreover, the Bible’s claims concerning the
origins and goal of history make more sense than any other, and certainly
more sense than none.

As this
religion had some appeal for me, and because I had nothing better to do with
my life, I decided I would propagate its teachings to a needy world; but it
failed me when it proved unable to deal with the guilt of sin. A relative had
died, and I had written a letter of condolence based on the teaching of this
religion. I thought that in it I had expressed my love; but instead, I had
conveyed my subconscious arrogance, had given no comfort and had caused great
anguish. Feeling guilty, I consulted this religion’s founder for advice on
what to do. He said, in essence, ‘Hang in there. It will all work out if you
keep showing them your love.’ But it was this religion’s version of ‘love’
that had created the problem in the first place.

I was
beginning to become aware of the sinfulness of sin without having a word for
it. This religion, like others of its kind, hasn’t a clue about the
fundamental seriousness of sin. The advice that ‘it will all work out,’
whether couched in the language of karma or of psychology, neither deals with
an individual’s guilt nor describes the absolute offensiveness of sin to a
holy God. Abandoning my plan to become this religion’s ‘Paul,’ I was once
again in the market for better answers.

Since I no
longer had health-food stores to run or a religion to push, I accepted my
brother’s offer to work for him in his real-estate development business. I
drove up and down central California looking for land on which he and his partners
could build apartment complexes.

One night,
when I was on the road, I stayed in a motel where the owners had placed on
the nightstand a small magazine of Christian testimonies from the Full Gospel
Businessmen’s fellowship. I read how Jesus had brought peace, order and
meaning to the lives of the men who wrote them; and tears welled up in my
eyes. But tears prove nothing – I cry over the stories in Reader’s Digest too. Still, I see now
that this was God’s first move in the events leading to my salvation.

One day,
as I was passing through Marysville, north of Sacramento, I entered a
health-food store that, with its displays of organically grown fruit and open
barrels of raw nuts, reminded me of my own stores. But on its walls, instead
of volumes on how to raise your baby to be a vegetarian, there were books
with Jesus Christ’ in their titles. Those two words did not attract me; but I
leafed through a book called The
Spiritual Man, by Watchman Nee; and it seemed to contain at least as much
sense as the religions with which I had been involved.

I asked,
‘Who owns this store?’ The clerk replied, ‘We’re a Christian commune.’
‘That’s interesting,’ I said, ‘I had a hippie commune that ran health-food
stores like this. Can I crash with you tonight?’ (I knew that was an Okay
question to ask at a commune.) They accepted my invitation.

After an
appointment with a real estate agent in nearby Yuba City, I joined them at
their communal house, located in a tiny town with the prophetic name
Smartsville. There I heard their pastor Jerry Russell preach on Roman 10:9:

‘If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is
Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be
saved.’

I didn’t understand
the verse, but he said it six or eight times, so it stuck in my mind. I had
no trouble with its first two clauses. Since most of the other religions I
had investigated taught that we are all God, and that we all get
reincarnated, I supposed it would be true of Jesus too. I had nothing against
him, so why should he be an exception? It was the rest of the verse that
puzzled me – ‘…you will be saved.’
I remember a cartoon from the late 1950s showing a preacher behind a huge
pulpit and a vast audience ranging back into darkness; the focus was on two
mystified congregants, with one whispering to the other, ‘Saved from what?’
However, since the sin issue had begun to surface in my consciousness, I was
beginning to become aware that it is sin and its consequences from which we
must be saved.

I was
mulling these things over after the sermon when a fellow of about twenty, six
months a believer, stationed himself in front of me and jarred me from my
thoughts with a question no one had ever put to me in my thirty-seven years
of living: ‘Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour and
Lord?’ I sighed a knowing sigh and explained in my most patient professional
voice, ‘I’m really delighted, brother, that you’ve found a path to God that
meets your needs, and if you want to hear what I’ve learned about God I’ll be
glad to tell you.’ I thought that was a great answer; but he didn’t think so
at all and began telling me I was a sinner, the penalty for sin is death and
eternal separation from God, but God accepts a substitute, as shown by the
sacrificial system, and the ultimate sacrifice is Jesus, who died for you and
me, and you can accept him by faith, and you can pray to receive him in your
heart right now, and … He went on and on. Finally, when he paused for breath,
I thanked him, turned and left the room. I must admit that even though his
callow insensivity bothered me at the time, it was from him that I first
heard the essence of the Gospel. Now, when I find myself communicating the
Gospel to people who don’t seem open to it, I remember how God used this
person in my life.

I crossed
the street to the communal house and noticed there how the people in this
commune truly loved each other. I could see it in how they treated one
another. (‘By their fruits you will
know them.’ ‘A new commandment I give you: love one another as I have loved
you. By this the world will know that you are my disciples.’) I was
impressed, because in those days lots of hippies and ex-hippies (like these
people) talked about love, but seeing it in practice was rare. My being
impressed by their love was a very Jewish reaction. Jewish people tend to
judge by actions rather than beliefs. Someone who behaves well will be
forgiven strange beliefs, but a person with the ‘right’ beliefs will not be
forgiven improper actions.

After a
good night’s sleep I returned to their store, bought some more books and went
on my way, reading as I drove up and down California. (Do I dare admit publicly
that this is to be taken literally – the steering wheel in one hand, a book
in the other? Anyhow, I don’t drive like that any more.) On the night of 20
October, 1972, I was in a motel in Fresno and couldn’t sleep, so I opened the
New Testament, and my eyes fell across Romans 10:9. To this day I can’t
explain it, but I realised I had come to believe that Jesus is Lord – he
alone, not all of us – and that God had raised him from the dead – him alone,
not all of us. So, staring at the blank ceiling, I confessed it aloud to God;
and according to that verse I was, at that moment, saved.

It took a
while for the implications of that un-dramatic event to manifest themselves
in my life. For example, it didn’t occur to me to get baptized, or to go to a
church. When, some six weeks later, I revisited the Smartsville commune and
told them what had happened, they were understandably delighted and invited
me to be immersed in the Yuba River. I was glad to do it, and I can say that
its Sierra-fresh 40-degree water didn’t even feel cold.

In the
months that followed, I confronted the question of whether God’s Word as
revealed in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is really his truth. Yet
the more I tested my faith by questioning, the more I became intellectually
satisfied that the Bible is God-inspired, that it tells us the truth about
him and his involvement in human history, and that it is the one infallible
guide to correct faith and practice. From the beginning my beliefs were
always open to rebuttal by facts and logic, and they still are. But I trust
Yeshua to keep me ‘until that Day.’

God has
worked in me to resolve my questions about life’s meaning. Where do we come
from? Why are we here? Where are we going? And most of all, why bother? As I
explored the Bible I found that it spoke to these questions of mine with ever
deepening insights. It satisfied both my heart and my mind, and it continues
to do so.

I did not
immediately feel the full tension of being Jewish and at the same time
believing in Yeshua as Israel’s Messiah. During the following months, as I
became an object of controversy, and the ramifications of the
two-thousand-year-old problem became clearer, I saw that understanding it and
working toward resolving it would become my life’s work. I soon became as
interested in Judaism as in the New Testament. I concluded that while the
so-called ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is, as one Jewish writer puts it, a
‘myth’; equally false is the conclusion that a person cannot be a Jewish
‘believer’ and must choose either Christ or Judaism, but not both. I became
convinced in my spirit that the Lord was calling me to help develop Messianic
Judaism as a genuine option wherein a person could be 100% Jewish and 100% a
follower of Yeshua the Messiah.

Being an
academic type, I returned to school, first to Fuller Theological Seminary in
Pasadena, California, where I earned a Master of Divinity degree and taught
the seminary’s first-ever course in ‘Judaism and Christianity.’ Then for a
year I studied Talmud and Rashi alongside America’s future rabbis in the
Graduate School of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.

In 1974
Fuller organized a ‘Hebrew in Israel’ study tour, which I joined. My
intention was only a summer visit – I had never once thought of living in
Israel. But when the head of an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva I was visiting in Jerusalem learned of my beliefs, he
urged me to talk with an ex-Lutheran who had converted to Judaism and was
studying to become a rabbi. This person, on hearing my vision for Messianic
Judaism as a movement within the Jewish people, was not opposed; indeed he
was rather intrigued. However, he challenged me not to remain in California
but to make aliyah (immigrate to
Israel). He said no significant Jewish movement would ever again be centered
in the Diaspora, now that the Jewish state exists. ‘Don’t you know,’ he
asked, that ‘out of Zion shall come
forth Torah, and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem?’ Instantly God used
this apostate Christian’s citation of Isaiah 2:3 to change my mind 180
degrees, and from that moment I knew that one day I would live in Israel.

After
graduating from Fuller, I planned to attend ‘Messiah ’75,’ the 1975
convention of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America. About a week before
this conference, God gave me a prophecy. He woke me at 4 AM and had me write:

‘At
Messiah ’75 I will show you your wife. At first you will not recognize her.
When you do, you will be dismayed, because no woman on earth could meet the standards
you have set up for your wife! But when you think about it, you will realize
that I have made the right choice. It will then be up to you to woo and win
her. I am the Lord.’

He
fulfilled the prophecy by bringing me to Martha Frankel, another Messianic
Jew; and in 1976 she ended my forty years of bachelorhood, as we were married
under the palm trees that had shaded my grandparents’ backyard.

Shortly
after we were married, we spent a year with the organization Jews for Jesus.
Then I began my Messianic Jewish writing projects, and in 1979 our daughter
Miriam was born. Four months later we made aliyah. In 1981 our son Daniel was born in Tel Aviv, our family’s
only sabra (native-born Israeli).
But we are Israelis too, part of the great ingathering promised by God and
for which Jews have prayed three times daily for two thousand years. We live
in a remodelled old stone house in Jerusalem.

As of now
I have produced four books; Messianic
Jewish Manifesto, which presents my view of the history, ideology,
theology and program of Messianic Judaism in a systematic way; Restoring the Jewishness of the Gospel: A
Message for Christians, a 90-page abridgement of ‘Manifesto’ for
Christians who have not seriously considered the Jewishness of their faith; the
Jewish New Testament, which is my
translation of the New Testament into English in a way that expresses its
Jewishness, and a companion volume, the Jewish
New Testament Commentary, which deals, verse-by-verse, with the Jewish
issues raised in the New Testament. As I write this, I am several months away
from publishing the Complete Jewish
Bible, which combines in a single volume my version of the Tanakh (Old Testament) with the Jewish New Testament. I see no end to
this work of mine, because it deals with the greatest schism in history, the
separation between the Church and the Jewish people. If I had a hundred
researchers and lived to be 120, there would still be more to do.

Through saving
me and giving me this work God has given meaning and purpose to my life. He
has also given me a wonderful wife and children and a place to live in the
Land of Israel, the home of the Jewish people. Praise you, Lord our God, King
of the Universe, who has kept us alive, preserved us and enabled us to reach
this joyous season.